No, that one is not in there.
I’m finding the Audible daily deals really good. Picked up 2 or 3 books for either £1.99 or £2.99 on top of my normal credits, really helps keep the books rolling along.
Got Whiskey from Small Glasses, Mercy and The Crow Girl.
I normally also buy the extra 3 credits every now and then.
Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3) by Craig Alanson is looking to be a strong candidate for the best out of three for this saga so far. Overall this series can be kinda repetitive and over-reliant on the same jokes and schemes, but it’s a fun “space captain from a young Earth civilization let loose on the galaxy and beyond thanks to found Elder technology” subgenre, but with a sorta unique “asshole Elder AI friend” character tagging along.
Recently completed the World Walker series by Ian W. Sainsbury. Not particularly good, but interesting and not terrible. Local Earth man, about to die of natural causes at a young age, is picked by a mysterious seemingly sleeping alien who’d crashed here in Roswell and waited for this moment to give the man special powers. Sorta reminded me of the Green Lantern origin story. Most of the plot and story and character stuff is super derivative, but it’s fun and sometimes interesting if you go in with low expectations.
Prior to that, I read a bunch of Stuart McBride mysteries including A Dark So Deadly (Callum MacGregor #1 I guess) and the first 6 Logan McRae books. These have been recommended by a few folks in these threads (@Lloyd_Heilbrunn in particular). Really good but it’s dark and some of the jokes get a little old (e.g. the ridiculous DS/DCI relationships).
Before that I read the Pierce Brown Red Rising series, which apparently was widely well received by readers and critics (I’d been hit with many recommendations when I decided to try it), and I think for the most part it’s extremely overrated and probably not worth looking at unless you read a lot and are a sucker for the genre.
I really enjoyed A Dark So Deadly, listened to it on Audiobook and it was great, a tad slow but felt it was really well written with some good humour.
Read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It was a fun read, and I liked it quite a lot. It really stuck to the core concept, and I don’t care if it was obviously pandering to my demographic.
Finished the The Stone Sky by N K Jemisin and I think she may well win a third Hugo for it. It’s that good. An excellent ending to one of the best trilogies of recent years, a true “Clarke’s Law” series where magic and advanced technology are not just interchangeable but indistinguishable, with incredible characterization and really powerful emotional beats.
I’m still digesting. These books always leave me with days of feels afterwards. Good stuff.
Wasn’t me, don’t recall ever hearing about these. Have recommended Scottish author Ian Rankin. But might have to try them too.
Oh whoops, my bad, I guess I must have mixed that up in part because the books are similar to a few of the other mystery series you’ve mentioned here.
No biggie.
I’ve been reading Reese Hirsch’s Chris Bruen series. The protagonist is a lawyer specializing in Cybercrime. The author is a lawyer specializing in cybercrime and privacy so the books are technically sound. My only beef is that in book one, he moves the DefCon conference from Vegas to Brooklyn. He gets all the other facts about DefCon correct. I thought one year they had a spinoff conference not in Vegas. It’s a minor point, but given how correct the book is in other ways, I wish he hadn’t fudged the details.
I’m enjoying them. They are light, action thrillers and I can generally figure out where the books are going, but I enjoy how they they get there. There are a male and female protagonist, and he does a good job at not making Chloe the “typical hacker girl”. There are some things that are like that, but I like the character.
The books are relatively cheap on Amazon Kindle.
I recently re-read The Man in the High Castle. It’s been 20 years, so I remembered very little in the way of details about the individual characters and plot. I remember why now - I didn’t really think it was a particularly good story, and none of the characters really did much for me. But I remember that I still enjoyed it back in the day, and I did again, because of the world-building. One of the first alternate-history novels I ever read and the ideas are still interesting to me today.
It’s hard not to compare the novel to the Amazon video series now, of course. The writers and producers seem to have had more or less the same reaction to the novel as I did, since they used lots of the world-at-large ideas and little else. Character names, a few places and events, but all of that stuff is handled very differently in the show. Which is good, since a straight recounting of the events of the novel would make pretty terrible TV.
I’m super late to the game on Scott Lynch. I’ve just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora because my husband won’t stop going on about how good it is. Was hoping to prove him wrong but actually I really enjoyed it. Fantasy is not normally my thing but the plot with all its twists really piqued my interest.
Yeah. As an artist I hold Dick in high esteem, but the book ain’t exactly the blueprint for a blockbuster TV series.
Finished the Expeditionary Force series and you know, it really ain’t bad if you’re a sucker for cheesy space pirate romps. Major spoilers: (Classified human mission to roam the galaxy using found Alien technology, trying to prevent incredibly powerful sort of neighboring aliens from coming back to earth or even knowing that we’re out there, by basically messing with their intel and ultimately conducting black ops against them, with a tremendous amount of help from a found super intelligent and secret Elder Alien AI that no other species has access to and whose physical form is roughly the size of a beercan, and who happens to be a complete asshole.)
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Ops-Expeditionary-Force-Book-ebook/dp/B07121G4ZC
Just started a fantasy novel by the same author (Craig Alanson). So far seems to be a traditional, but not bad “super powerful wizard coming of age” tale, so far.
https://www.amazon.com/Ascendant-Craig-Alanson-ebook/dp/B01AJ6S466
Yes, I absolutely loved The Lies of Locke Lamora. The rest of the series is not up to the same standard, sadly - still enjoyable, but doesn’t have the gut-punch intensity of the first novel.
I just finished A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by GRRM - it was my first exposure to the Dunk and Egg stories and I really enjoyed it. I just love the trope of dropping a relentlessly noble character into the morally grey world of Westeros.